The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  What Henry feels is disgust. He and Anne have just had an exchange which went roughly as follows:

  H: The second statement’s the incriminating one.

  A: It is.

  H: So if you get that struck out, there’s not much of a case left.

  A: Not much. No.

  H: And you think because he was asking for his mum …

  A: He’s only seventeen, Henry.

  H: D’you think he did it?

  A: That’s irrelevant, darling. This is a point of law.

  H: Oh sorry. I was thinking about all those knife wounds. Silly me.

  A: Well, of course, yes, he did …

  H: Did?

  A: Strike the blows—probably. Most likely.

  H: Ah!

  A: Henry, I say ‘Of course he did.’ But that might be wrong. That’s why it has to be due process.

  H: You mean due process is never wrong?

  A: No. It might sometimes produce a wrong result. But when it does, no one’s to blame.

  FRIDAY THE 13TH AND Kev came to the door early. The digger had broken into an old clay pipe. Kev thought it must be the existing sewer, but it wasn’t where it ought to be. Henry was able to put his mind at rest. The pipe they’d broken into was an even older one, not used any more except unofficially for taking field-tile drainage from lawns and gardens.

  MUST PUT DOWN HENRY’S dream before it’s forgotten:

  They (he and Anne) were in London, the two of them walking through streets that got narrower, more ruined, filled with debris, fallen beams, dust, wreckage. He was worried, trying to remember where they were and where they were going. They came to a dinner table and sat down. It was properly laid—cutlery, candles, flowers, wine, glasses, napkins. Well-dressed people sat around making polite and witty conversation, but all about them lay the ruins of the city. Henry began to talk to them about his research. It had to do with Austrian milk vendors.

  BASTILLE DAY: ‘ALLONS, ENFANTS … ’ Henry sings, celebrating two hundred years of liberty-equality-fraternity or aspiration thereto. Remember (he writes in his diary!) the story about the Chinese Communist Government official on a visit to Paris asked what, from a Chinese point of view, had been the significance of the French Revolution in world history. Chinese official replied, ‘It is too soon to say.’

  Kev’s team is now two doors down the street. Watching them,

  Henry understands something about unemployment. They dig down more than two metres, a trench wide enough for two pipes (large and larger) side by side. By hand, that would take how many men how long? The digger does it in twenty minutes. When it comes to a hedge it lifts a section out, roots and all, to be put back later. The trench runs dead straight across the fronts of four properties. Back at the last set of man-holes two laser beams are set to fire a pencil-thin beam of red light through the centre of each pipe. As long as the beams make bullseye hits on targets set further down, the drains are laid dead straight and there’s no need for a surveyor to check.

  The team works in pairs. Kevin and his mate dig out the trench, put in the pipes, and fill as they go. The second team comes up behind, laying top-soil over the disturbed clay, replanting grass, replacing concrete paths, hedges and gardens.

  The second team also does the new drainage around the houses, separating sewage and stormwater and bringing them down to the new lines. This part of it has to be done by hand. But the narrow-gauge pipes around the houses are plastic now, where they used to be clay.

  SUNDAY: HERE’S A TRUE story. Last evening Henry and Anne went to a little Italian restaurant on Karangahape Road, the Quattro Fontane. Just half a dozen tables, one waitress and the owner, Frederico—first-rate cook, amiable host, loud, flamboyant, banging his pans around, shouting jokes and orders over his shoulder, singing, sending flames up to the ceiling.

  Henry had his back to the kitchen. Anne watched Frederico and worried. He should go more slowly. No need for all that drama. One day he’ll blow up. Etc.

  No more than ten customers all evening; and late, when most have gone, Anne sees Frederico go behind a curtain to a little room, or space, under the stairs. Now she has tight hold of Henry’s wrist. Something’s wrong. Frederico is having some kind of seizure or spasm—she can see the curtain moving violently. There’s a thump as he hits the floor, a groan just audible over the Pavarotti tape. She’s sure he’s having a heart attack. Henry must go and help him.

  Well! It can be said, it will be imagined, that Henry was not keen. He’d had a lot of red wine. He didn’t want to know about heart attacks. There was a predictable exchange—How could she be sure that …? How could he ignore the needs of …?

  So now Henry gets up and lumbers towards the curtain behind which, despite Pavarotti’s best efforts to drown it out, there is indeed occurring some kind of heaving and groaning. Henry pulls the curtain back. Frederico is down on the floor, right enough. Face down. But the waitress is underneath him. There is a general impression of clothes pulled up, pulled down, got out of the way without being shed. Frederico is riding up and down on a gentle swell. The waitress is smiling. Her eyes drift over an ocean of content, then heavenward over Frederico’s shoulder where they meet … Henry’s! They widen, scrunch up into a frown. She begins to beat the cook’s shoulders with her small fists, hissing at him, ‘Get off me. Leave me alone.’

  Henry lets the curtain drop and returns to his table. He tells Anne Frederico is OK. He’s just lying down—so to speak.

  Anne wants to know what ‘so to speak’ means. He tells her.

  She nods. They stare at one another, hands over mouths, trying not to laugh. She apologises.

  Henry shrugs and says he supposes it’s one kind of heart attack. She says she hopes he washes his hands before he goes back to cooking.

  1 6 JULY: HENRY HAS been thinking again about Wim Wenders and his angels in Wings of Desire. He writes into his diary two lines from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe which Janet Frame (who had an angel at her table) quotes in one of her novels:

  The angels not half so happy in heaven Went envying her and me.

  This quotation sends him hunting for an essay about Poe by Allen Tate, ‘The Angelic Imagination’. He finds it and copies sentences:

  The human intellect cannot reach God as essence; only God as analogy. Analogy to what? Plainly analogy to the natural world; for there is nothing in the intellect that has not previously reached it through the senses … Since Poe refuses to see nature, he is doomed to see nothing. He has overleaped and cheated the condition of man … Man as angel becomes a demon who cannot initiate the first motion of love, and we can feel only compassion for his suffering, for it is potentially ours.

  31 JULY: ANOTHER MONTH gone. So has Kev with all his machines and men and reminders of the long-ago. Work on Alban Ashtree is suspended, maybe for ever. Bob Wilcox has written from Quinton explaining why Henry has had no formal replies to his inquiries. There is, it seems, some uncertainty about where and how the accident which killed Ashtree occurred. It is supposed to have happened in Austria, but the only accident of this kind at that time occurred in Switzerland. Meanwhile the Canada Council has said the substantial amount it has put up for posthumous editing of his works is available only to Canadian scholars; but the funds are frozen until a death certificate has been received.

  Henry thinks it a nice little irony (anger management teaches him to avert his eyes from the larger one) that Canadian funds have been ‘frozen’. But Switzerland? He is sure Alban Ashtree would have wanted death by alliteration: an avalanche in the Austrian Alps.

  SUMMER (WHANGAMATA): HENRY HAS been glancing through this notebook which he has neglected for how many months? Its contents have faded along with the memory of Quinton and his excitement at the idea of being first to publish a full-length study of Ashtree’s poetry. This morning he and Anne sat on the sand watching the oystercatchers. Parent bird flew out to the reef (waves washing over), worked a mussel free, flew back to the sand above tide-mark, broke it open, dragged f
ish out, flew up to higher sand where the chick was sitting in, or walking around, the ‘nest’ (hardly more than a hollow with maybe a few twigs or sticks). Chick, well fed by this hour, accepted the mussel with bad grace. Parent bird returned to the reef for more. When finally the tide had covered the mussel bed, the parent bird went to the empty shells and lunched off scraps still adhering.

  Time to close this notebook. Henry wonders if, when the new term begins, he will take HOD’s advice and turn his critical attention to the work of Hone Tuwhare. But no—that’s not a serious thought, or not for him when he remembers a filing cabinet in the depths of that Canadian winter and the insights it has left him with.

  He pauses to ask himself: was the work he did and the notes he took during that lonely weekend in Quinton (and the days that followed) ‘theft of intellectual property’ or ‘research’—especially since everything was put back in place, and it later emerged that the rightful owner was already dead? What would Anne say? Are the two, theft and research, ever entirely distinct? And does it matter now? Once certain facts are known, and ideas planted, it’s difficult to un-know and un-plant them. Henry’s thoughts about the mysteries of the Snow Maiden are still growing and sprouting.

  No, of course he will persist with Ashtree.

  Three: Brightness falls from the air: the Woodlake campus

  THE SNOW HAS COME back. Henry knew it this morning before getting up and looking out—‘sensed’ it; which means, he supposes, that his waking eyes registered the different light, its whiteness.

  And Albie has gone again. That too Henry knew while he lay there, because the silence that comes with the otherworldly light of the fallen snow was undisturbed by the poet’s frantic work at the typewriter in the next room.

  Now, looking out through a window, Henry is watching a cat making its way through the snow, which comes up to its shoulders. It tries a high-stepping walk; then an intermittent leaping. Henry isn’t sure what it’s looking for, but he supposes food. It stops to shake itself, disliking the sense that its fur is becoming wet, uncertain now whether to go forward or back.

  He wonders why the sight of animals going about their daily business gives such pleasure, and decides it’s because what they do exactly matches, in scale, what they need to do, whereas our doings are always an excess. He imagines them taking over when we, the human race, become extinct. They must be kin, he thinks, or there would be no pleasure in that thought.

  During the past couple of days, while Albie bashed away at his typewriter and raced in and out to the kitchen and to the bench press on the cold front porch, Henry has observed the squirrels. There was no sign of snow then, and they darted about the campus lawns digging for buried nuts. Though the cold out there was intense even in the sun, it was as if spring must be just around the corner. But yesterday, while the sky was blue and the sun continued to shine, the squirrels’ demeanour changed. They knew something Henry didn’t know. They were anxious, and not for food. They hung upside down on the boughs and trunks of trees, stripping bark and running up to repair their nests. This morning they’re gone, hiding away in those newly patched interiors, and all down the Jersey Shore the snow is falling.

  There is no sky, just a low grey blankness out of which the flakes sail like an invasion of paratroopers; and the brightness seems to come, not down from above, but up from below. Light has taken on substantial form. It has broken up and is tumbling out of the heavens. Still shining, it covers lawns and paths; heaps up on hedges, statues, fences, gates, on outdoor chairs and tables. It piles up along branches, and falls from them in sudden, splintering showers. Soon the ploughs will be out to clear the road, and the shovels will attack paths and sidewalks. But for now it comes thick and fast and lies undisturbed.

  Henry—Professor Henry Bulov, according to the Times Literary Supplement ‘the world’s leading interpreter of the works of Alban Ashtree’—turns on Woodlake’s Memory Station which plays ‘the greatest music of all time’, meaning ‘top of the charts ’40s through ’60s’. He begins to make breakfast and then, feeling the need of company, changes his mind, puts on overcoat, scarf, gloves, hat, and walks to the campus dining room where the nuns will smile and urge him to eat more, to keep warm, to look after himself.

  That over, he will wait for the ploughs and shovels to do their work before walking the mile or so to the supermarket. There’s nothing he needs there, but it’s somewhere to go. Meanwhile, there is the latest batch of poems Albie has given him to read—more of the same he has read and re-read this past fortnight. By now Henry knows what to expect. They will be sharp, pictorial, ‘Japanesey’, occasionally witty, now and then gritty. But where has the grand sweep gone, the larger scale? Where are the Modernist ambulations, the parodic dislocations of the post-Modern? What has become of the great Canadian epic-maker and courage-teacher, delineator of northern wastes, servant of the mythical White Queen, poet-father of the Snow Maiden? Where among all these miniaturist nail-parings is the majesty that was Alban Ashtree? Where, for fuck’s sake, is Libby Valtraute?

  Crunching through the dry snow, up to his ankles in it, Henry says over to himself lines from a sixteenth-century poet whose name eludes him, and wonders whether they have sprung to mind because of the snow or because of the decline of a once major poet:

  Brightness falls from the air,

  Queens have died young and fair,

  Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,

  I am sick, I must die—

  Lord, have mercy upon us.

  But this is a story, and we must go back two weeks to take up the thread.

  HENRY BULOV, RECENTLY APPOINTED full professor by his previously reluctant university in New Zealand, arrived at JFK with his modest and battered baggage, and was met at the foot of the escalator below the American Airlines desk by a Gofar Limo driver holding up a sign with a version of his name he hadn’t encountered before: PROF BELOVE. He shook hands with the driver and they joked about the mistake. Henry told him about the fax from Woodlake College saying he would be met by a representative of the Gofar Limp Company.

  There was a sixty-mile drive south to Woodlake. Henry sat in the back and pretended to read papers, pretended to sleep, did sleep—but not before he had had his views of the Manhattan skyline across water in the fading light, and seen the Staten Island ‘hills’ that were really New York’s garbage mountains. When he woke it was dark and they were somewhere in the State of New Jersey, pulling in at the doors of a restaurant built out over a river or tidal inlet.

  Ashtree, now disguised and known as Albie Strong, met him at the door. It was their first encounter, and the greetings were loud and long, the smiles broad, the handshakes strong.

  ‘We’re dining alone,’ Albie explained. ‘There are things I have to get straight with you.’

  There were indeed. The circumstances of Henry’s invitation had been mysterious—not surprisingly since it was generally understood that the poet Alban Ashtree was dead, killed (though the body had never been recovered) in an avalanche in the Austrian Alps. It was a death which had always given Henry anxiety. It lacked the sense of perfect closure that ought to accompany a genuine demise. It was not like Shelley, drowned in a Ligurian storm and his body burned on the beach at Viareggio; or Byron’s death in Greece, the body subsequently returned to England in a barrel of spirits. There was an air of fiction, even of contrivance, about Ashtree’s. It had been too good to be true—iconologically apt (Ashtree was poet and theorist of the Snow White Goddess), and lexically perfect, the author’s name piling up in alliteration with place and event. ‘Alban Ashtree,’ Henry’s book on him began, ‘died in an avalanche in the Austrian Alps.’ It had been the easiest sentence to write and the hardest to believe. Even the Canada Council, afflicted by doubts, had frozen funds set aside for the posthumous editing of the collected works.

  But this uncertainty had only added to the aura surrounding Ashtree’s name and his poetry. The man for so long known only in his own country was soon being talked about in
New York and in London. Two years after his ‘death’ the work, previously published only in Canada, was available everywhere in English, and translations into several European languages were appearing or planned. And Henry Bulov, the first non-Canadian to write seriously about Ashtree, and the only person (no one knew how this had come about) to have had access to some of his private notebooks, had found the academic escalator, for so long stalled beneath his feet, all at once lurching on up to full professorial status. Bulov had helped to make Ashtree famous; Ashtree’s fame had helped to make Bulov respectable. These two, it seemed, needed one another; and now, improbably (‘It’s like a story,’ Henry said, as they gave up the handshaking and embraced) here they were meeting for dinner in a New Jersey restaurant that looked out over a coastal inlet.

  Albie (as he asked to be called) was a tall, well-constructed fifty-two-year-old with a good head of grey hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore jeans, boots, a shirt of red corduroy and a leather jacket. He talked fast, ate fast, seemed impatient, but also excited to be meeting the critic who had done so much to promote his work and his reputation. The avalanche, he told Henry, had been real, though not quite in Austria, which he preferred for reasons of euphony. He had been taken up by it, swept down the mountain slope, and then, by some miracle, or quirk of the rolling snow, had been ejected—cast out on to a ridge from which he had been able to make his way down to a village on the lower slopes. He was bewildered, slightly concussed, and it was some hours before he recovered his sense of who and where he was. By that time the news was out. Seven were missing, four already confirmed dead.

  With the least possible fuss he returned to his ski lodge, where he had gone unaccompanied, removed a few essentials, and departed, leaving gear by which he could be identified. Next day, from a village further down the mountain he rang two newspapers, one in Toronto, the other in Vancouver, to report the death of the poet Alban Ashtree. It was meant only to bring him a little attention, but the story ran all across Canada, from east to west, from west to east, its authenticity never seeming to be checked. Though for a time he travelled on his own passport, and drew on his own bank account, no one appeared to notice. It would have been better from a nationalist point of view had they been Canadian snows; but as far as the Canadian literary and academic community were concerned the fact was romantic enough: Alban Ashtree the poet had died in that Austrian avalanche.